Whether they know it or not, nearly every communication scholar today works with ideas that George Herbert Mead helped to develop. It was Mead who urged scholars to think of communication as a collaborative interaction rather than a sequence of thoughts, coded, sent, and received. It was Mead who described the sense of self as social rather than individual, public rather than private, and emergent rather than permanent. And it was Mead who put these new theories of self and communication to work, in the service of social and educational reform.

The American philosopher John Dewey once described Mead as "a seminal mind of the very first order." Yet Mead's contributions went unappreciated for many years after his death in 1931. By that time, philosophy had become absorbed in narrower questions of language and truth, and social psychology had embraced quantitative modes of...